The Smooth Snapping of a Circle
by Ice Cold Absolution
Summary: Draco Malfoy joins the Death Eaters, but it affects his life in ways he never thought. DracoTom Riddle, DracoPansy. 3rd chapter of 5 posted!
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: Nothing that you recognise is mine, it belongs to J.K Rowling.

Warnings: This story contains slash and, in this chapter, het. If you don't like slash, don't read it.

**Start **

and that made it all alright? Kneeling on the cold floor that might have been clean but might not have been really because he wasn't able to see properly because of the lighting in the chamber or it might have been because of the fear, but no it was the light. But these robes were very expensive because he had thought that this would all be pomp and show and he would have looked regal and pure blooded in the fine cut and material. But none of it mattered anymore because he was kneeling on the floor and it was only half light anyway and it was so stereotypical but they, the ones circling him, were all on the run and hiding so there wasn't really much choice. He always appeared as Tom (though he could never be called that by anyone, not anyone at all because he was always really called the Dark Lord, on the inside) now that he had the ability to turn that little clock back. And he had heard that Potter had once seen what his Lord had looked like back when he was human and he hadn't thought much of it then, but now he hated him because he saw the real Dark Lord first and he had that knowledge inside him all those years they went to school together and he never once shared it with him, not once and the fact that they never spoke nicely meant nothing in the face of his Dark Lord.

He didn't know where the Golden Trio and their Gryffindors were now and the school lay empty because in the end even the old fool of a headmaster wasn't arrogant enough to keep a school open in the middle of a raging war, especially when he was one of the main targets. And he didn't know where most of his own friends were anymore because they were all part-of-this now and when you were part-of-this there was no time for friends. Only for kneeling on the maybe dirty floor bowing his head and hoping that he saw only good things in his mind. Because he knew that he was dedicated to this cause with his whole heart, but his mind was a different matter and he didn't know what there was to find but he could feel the layers and layers peeling away as submissive as a petal under _his_ thumb (maybe he would see an image of himself almost glowing in this subtle half light as the true awing Dark Lord and he didn't know why he was ashamed of this). He would spare not for the name Malfoy in the days when one lay cold in his grave and another warm and he was the only one left and he was never quite good enough and he was always weak but there was no choice anymore and he did not quite look like his father but maybe all that would mean was that he would not die like his father.

The other side called themselves good but the moment outright war was declared Azkaban was swept with Slytherin green and it almost made you wonder how those hoards of Gryffindors could stand it. But it stayed and stayed and the sky shone with it and what were once prisoners of war became casualties and they were captured prisoners and they had no wands and they were helpless and they were just killed like animals in a pen, like muggles. But he only followed the Dark Lord and they drew no such distinctions as good and evil, they were too interchangeable, there was only the right blood and the wrong. And if he just focused on thinking about blood purity and the strength of the dust running through his veins then surely his Lord could find nothing to contend with in his mind. Eventually he felt the probes slowly retracting, taking their time to keep scanning as they were removed because really he had all the time in the world because no one would even think of pushing him out. And he just had to keep focusing on blood and the waning power of their kind due to tainting and not the possible dirt of the floor and the creases that were slowly being fixed into his beautiful robes because there were levels of importance at that very second. But he was out of his mind and for a moment it felt slightly empty without the little fingers pushing deeper and deeper into his thoughts and making a mess of the careful filing that would all have to be fixed later that night. Still once that was done he couldn't just move onto the next stage, having the indignity of having to share a ceremony with another youth beside him, as though he were just as worthy, but there was no time in wars to give anyone something alone. The person beside him could have been his best friend, his worst enemy or someone he had never met but he hated them then for stealing his day, his glory and his Lords attention. He couldn't decide whether to despise them as a poverty stricken idiot or be jealous about the fact that they may have had the foresight to wear a thick hooded travelling cloak, no delicate material to be ruined and they wouldn't be feeling the chill of the stone below soaking through their clothes, through their blood and hitting their bones.

When that was over too (was he in his head for much longer than his unknown companion's? Or did it just seem like that but mental tricks couldn't have created that much difference could they? The Dark Lord couldn't have doubted his own loyalty but accepted this thick-cloaked beggar's so quickly could he?) they could finally stand again and he could hear his bones creaking and prayed that no one else could, he was not supposed to be an old man, he was fresh out of school and schoolchildren's bones did not creak. He had to fight to not lever himself up with his hand but that would have been a weakness and those that showed weakness had it writhed out of them despite the fact that crucio was such a crass shade of red. But that wasn't what they were standing for. He pulled back the sleeve of his robe and exposed the paper white of his underarm and it was amazing how such a little action could make one feel so terribly vulnerable but, of course, that was what his Lord was aiming for. There was a strange light in the acid eyes of the man about to mark him, own him and he was glad he wasn't in his mind anymore because he really didn't need to hear how that light just set shivers across his neck and how he figured that his Lord may get off on power a little more than a normal person would. Luckily that thought didn't stick around for very long because Morsmordre was black and when it hit him the rest of the world went black and it burnt and it burnt like cold vodka spilling down his throat but that was a pleasant burnt and this was just all consuming and the vodka had just been the start and his flesh could have been melting and he might have screamed. That was the worst part, his Lord might have seen him scream but there was nothing he could do about it now, only look down at what had once been a flawless white canvas and stroke the brand, tame it, and wait for his companion to be finished and hopefully that too would take much less time on the one beside him because he just wanted to go home. But even once he heard the other scream (it was definitely male, not too far away from him in age and thank God he screamed too because if he hadn't then he would have just had to burrow into one of the crumbling lines in the wall, scrambling though as though he were looking for coal) it still wasn't time to leave. They had to hear a speech about how they were to fight for blood purity and the conservation of blood power and it was just like a meal with his father again. But his father was dead. And he had to listen to this one because it was such a compelling person telling it (not that his father wasn't a very attractive man, he was reputed for it but things like that in ones father tends to be missed, although at least he looked enough like him to also be reputedly very handsome but this was silly because he wasn't thinking about the Dark Lord in terms of attractive) and he had always believed it so there was nothing to contend. And he was focusing and he was focusing and he was not thinking about that little shine in the corner of the room that he couldn't quite see without taking his eyes off his Lord and how it might be a pretty diamond because this was dangerously serious and if he wanted to survive in the system he had just placed himself into he had better be damned alert and be ready to crush others to get on top and he couldn't do that if he couldn't even focus on one thing. Yet eventually they were allowed to go with a final word to make him proud and he could only wonder if that meant that when they went into the battles they had to get dirty like he almost did today which would have been a shame because he didn't like getting dirty. Or dust, he didn't like dust so it was very stupid of him to have thought to have clambered into a hole in the wall that he carved out with his own fingertips, finger stumps by the end of it, his pure blood in a thin film over raggedly torn skin and muscle and scraped bone. He wouldn't have liked that at all, physicality was so crass.

Home was very different now because the house elves never treated him like they used to, before he became man of the house. It was good that they now fully respected him and didn't baby him like they used to (dirty creatures, always putting their clubbed fingers on him) but it was still a little disconcerting and it made him feel old. But it was probably for the best because that balanced it out for when he felt very young when he stood at the bottom on the stairs and looked up to his parents wing that was always dark but perfectly shining and tidy and silent and eventually he had to hurry on to his room where he would feel just his own age again when sliding into bed next to Pansy. But age didn't really matter anymore, in order to be allowed the honour of joining his Lord's ranks he had to kill some muggles and mudbloods, simple Avada Kedarva's, more elaborate showing off, some of them had been very young, younger than he could remember being himself, not that that really meant anything, he had problems remembering yesterday sometimes and when he thought back to Hogwarts the walls seem faded with dust and choked cobwebs. Some of them had been as old as the hill, they were difficult on the elaborate deaths because their bodies were so ready to just die they would try to slip away at the first look of his wand, he had to keep them alive and awake and feeling everything he did to them. It was difficult to keep track. And he would marry Pansy one day because that is what it said on the old parchment that lay in his father's old office, the same parchment as the one in her father's desk, the same one that lay in the Goblin's offices of magical contracts because they were destined to be together from the day he was born, pushed out of his mothers womb into her tiny arms. But one day they will have children and they will be smaller than the children he killed but they will have the chance to grow up and grow old in a world where Purebloods reigned and the power of magic was held safe in their fingers. It was a good match, the Malfoys and the Parkinsons had not merged for 200 years and they were both older than any of the ministerial systems that lay on the ground of their country like ink, like sickness.

She lay silent in the sheets as though she were a mere shadow of herself, a ghost with eyes that only saw into the future that they would make, not the troubles that lay before her. But he knew it was ridiculous because not only was she awake, never sleeping until he was holding her in his arms, but she had one of the clearest visions he could find anymore. In a nation in war and not only could she see the present but she could tie it in with a likely future and plot and plan and keep everything so organised it made the room lie perfectly still in shame for almost being mussed. It made him painfully aware of how unorganised his mind was left after the invasion, the sheets of white filing paper strewn around, covering up lies like dead bodies on a war field coated in snow. It made it all beautiful. Lying next to him was the woman that would bear his children and she would ensure that those children would be conceived, be born and raised perfectly, she would ensure that they had a future. He wasn't even married to her yet but there were velvet ropes holding them both together and it was hard to tell who had put them there but he was warm and comfortable and the feel of her skin warming his still chilled chest was enough to drive away the image of his Lord's mermaid purse cheekbones. She smelt like the opiates he had enjoyed in his summer holidays back when years could be split so simply, though he knew she would never touch the stuff, they would have destroyed her control, would have ruined the carefully structured order. And she was lying against him waiting for something and she wouldn't move or acknowledge him until she got it, they both knew that he would tell her after a moment, it was always after a moment, there was something g lost in those seconds when they lay against each other as though the other wasn't quite real, quite animate.

"It's done." And the whisper was all that was needed for a touch of necromancy and she turned to face him and the moon's light gave him only the grey scale to see her in but it was enough to see her mischievous quirk of what should have been petal pink lips and her sculpted eyebrow rise.

"What is done?" she asked innocently, stroking the top of his arm, trying to coax it into rolling over and though they were not married yet they had loved each other throughout their lives, even through other little flings on both sides and they had said until they died and she would have drank anything she had trained him to give her. His arm rolled over and even grey scale allowed it the magnificence it deserved, as though he had been born into his anaemically white skin simply for the purpose of giving the greatest contrast possible to the mark.

"You must have been a bad boy to have to be branded like this." And he loved it when she bit her lip like that and he could almost taste the blood blushing up against the surface and he could take all he needed to keep him sane and tied to her.

"Yes, you'd better watch out, someone like me is dangerous."

And they lay together in the dark, still and silent once again, waiting for the other to fall asleep first, always, and trying to not worry about anything else that was going on in the outside world, the little problems the elves stored up for a time they thought it was appropriate to tell the master of the house, the new list of dead. But she normally didn't press her face closer into his collarbone and sigh as though the bricks of the ministry had fallen upon her lungs, she normally didn't reach up until the insides of a petal brushed his earlobe and make sure she had his full and rapt attention. She didn't normally whisper into his ear, as quiet as though she were afraid that the walls might be listening to them, ready to report back to whomever walls might work for, whisper that she had seen the famed Harry Potter again that day. Normally she would just sling her arms loosely around him, allow her to be held equally loosely and fall into only a minimally guarded sleep.

**AN: Please review! If you read it you must have some kind of faint opinion!!**


	2. Chapter 2

**Slow **

That was what had been missing from those empty years at Hogwarts; so desperate for entertainment he had to bait the ever-temperamental Gryffindors for something to actually happen. But it was all happening there and magic had never been so beautiful to him and destruction truly was another form of creation. Break a body into a million pieces with a simple curse in an ancient heavy tongue, weighing down and you have created hundreds of fragments of flesh, a jigsaw. And of course the thought that if he excelled in this raid of one of the 'safe houses' that the supposed good side had set up then his Dark Lord would be very pleased with him, he had asked him specially to destroy this place, had nothing to do with the aching beauty of the scene of dying enemies. Curses sounded like music and it was so cliché because it was true and it was all an elaborate show with strobe lighting (cutting and slicing and blood dripped from his eyelashes and finally gave them colour which was good because sometimes being so pale irritated him, it was like he were a ghost, but ghosts can do no damage) and backing singers and it was beautiful acting when one of the others fell to the floor over a dead loved one, they allowed themselves to become so emotional. He had been better prepared for this kind of thing; once he knew he was doing a raid he knew what it would entail so he chose his attire appropriately. Obviously he had to wear the regular black to set off the mask that had been eerily reminiscent of his own face until it was knocked off and smashed against the ground, a reparo would have worked but before he could focus on it another of the dirty ones insisted on being killed and when he looked down again the pieces were gone. But he would be given a new one and the robes he was wearing was nicely cut to give him an intimidating stance and an impressive shadow (a nice thing to have when one must suffer a slight frame) and it was durable enough not to have ripped at silly things like being hit against a wall by a Protegeo or such like, they used such juvenile curses.

And this had been what it had been all building up to, it hadn't been much of a fight when it was just those filthy ones that needed protected, but how the fun had begun when the whole Order had turned up, apparently the people in the house were even more important that they had known. And this was what his father had been teaching him for when he was stood, aching cold in the middle of the ball room, tiny at his fathers side (_he_ never had a problem with being slight and it was the one thing he hated his mother for, damn her fragile bones, did they snap when her coffin hit the ground?). Being taught to withstand any conditions with spells for burning, spells for freezing, the ripping winds and the cloying rain and having to duel in those conditions. With noise raring in his ear and images flashing before his eyes until he completely forgot where he really was and who he was really duelling and was so overcome by fear and pain he would drop to the floor and sink into it and his mothers coddling embrace and healing spells as his father. It was strange how an aristocratic single heir pureblood could have felt so very much like a wounded mudblood, a dying muggle when he was lying in his mother's arms. And he would hear the speech about the history and prestige of the Malfoy line, in the flawless French that was wrung from his tongue the instant English had penetrated his mind, before being pushed out and set upon again until he could live up to his ancestors. Then one day he learnt that being lean wasn't always a bad thing and he figured out why his father had allowed his mother to teach him ballet when he was too young for dead languages and dark magic and he began to scorn the warmth of his mothers bony, fragile arms.

He had thought that there was no one there that he had known in that first raid, until he came across Cho Chang's body being clung to desperately by some older man that he only just recognised, he had never taken much notice of the Ravenclaws that he had not been friends with before school and that hadn't been on the Quidditch team. The man had been no threat but it was better to kill him anyway, the more survivors there were the more people to identify him definably as a Death Eater (stupid mask) and he would rather not have to ward off any raids of the Manor. It was a shame though, the girl had been pretty before her face was twisted into something ugly and splattered in the waste blood of others and those silly order always had problems with letting their emotions, their pain show. And yet it was liberating, to be able to see his old life in his new and make links with it all to the real world, to life progressing in stages and the person he was then was still there inside him but it had matured and improved and if no one ever did that then it would not have been worth it. You still had to have a past that was real and some people were far more liquid than human. And when he looked across the dead horizons of what had just a few hours ago been a perfectly bourgeois house with a square garden in the back and a rectangle in the front and he would have rather died in such a house, wealth had spoiled him for the real world but now it was being made into a place he could feel comfortable and the sun in the west was the Dark Lord and he was a mere dragon snap.

When he thought about things like that it allowed him to continue on as though he wasn't bleeding heavily himself, as though all of the blood giving him colour was that of other people. At some point he had been hit with some kind of burning hex and that had been too much, for a humiliating moment he had to retreat to a safer room in order to take the time to heal that one, being bloody and wounded was acceptable and heroic and striking but being blackened and twisted and smelling of burnt flesh wasn't and he couldn't let his image be ruined. Because then, when the sun shone down on him, he would have been exposed as a failing mortal and it would have seemed as though his blood weren't strong enough and. And there were wounds on him and there was the blood of mudbloods' all over him and it could have been seeping into his blood and infecting him and sapping his power and he didn't care about it soiling his skin but if it got into his veins, diluting the magic, diluting the dust. He had to get his wounds closed and their blood inside him had to be expunged but he knew no spell for that and the raid had to be won soon because he had to close up his wounds but it was too much in the thick of it to spare the time now. And it could have brought him to his knees but the floor was covered and he had to kill frantically to make it all be over quicker and he could feel his brothers at his sides and he knew that they had become unstoppable because there was no way that they could ever accept the idea of themselves dying out and when you had ineffable faith you made it so. And he had to think back to his mother when he paced his feet delicately in the gaps, the safe areas, curling and twisting with her in the ballroom that had been light and happy then. Elegant music floating in the background that was always so much more interesting when he wasn't the one being made to play it. And dancing that had then seemed so innocent and simple but he couldn't quite grasp that anymore, it was too entwined with killing and fighting with him now. But it was still beautiful and it was still pure and the things that died at the end of his wand should have applauded their way to heaven because he created masterpieces in their loss. And horizons were the edges of gardens and they bust with flowers and it didn't matter where they were or how they had been created because it was all how it was supposed to be and the earth would feed on blood until there were only plants left. And the call for the others to retreat was the groaning of accelerated growth, an oak being pulled out of the floor, up and up, scattering leaves onto the branches as they all popped away, another location, another set of bulbs to be buried.

Had he been excellent at that raid? Had he stood out as someone more dedicated to the cause than the others? He didn't really know, he didn't remember any of the details and he hadn't even been paying attention when he was there, too focused on his own thoughts, and then getting it all finished when he realised he was tainting himself. (He had closed all the wounds thank fuck but he was still covered top to toe in rich blood that wasn't so liquid and fun anymore but had tuned sticky and cold but you didn't do that kind of magic in front of the Dark Lord, especially when he was being told of your particular prowess in battle). He wondered how many of the heavy dusty books (damn those elves for never doing their job properly) he would have to look through to find a spell that would first allow him to check his blood to his satisfaction and then to get rid of all of the dirty people's blood, he could feel it as a little strain running round him and it was in his fingers while he stood before his Lord He knew that if it stayed there too long he wouldn't be able to do magic anymore and then his Lord would know and he could probably see it right now and that was why he was looking at him like that. Another drop of blood fell from his eyelash. It as the same room now that he had been initiated in and that seemed like so long ago but it could not have been more than a week, they had been given to cause to move on and this was large enough to house them all, a luxury that not all of them had. It angered him that they had to hide away like this, in the old warfare people did not hide away, when it was country against country the only people they hid from were the muggles who bred so quickly he was surprised they could all still breathe the oxygen they had in their mire. But at least he could console himself with the fact that the other side were hiding just the same and they would have too much 'morality' to do some of the spells that they did to make themselves comfortable. But this main room seemed so much less cavernous and dark now, when he could stand freely and cast his eyes around and all it needed were some windows (despite the underground nature of this lower chamber) and some furnishings and it could be done up to fit a Lord.

And he was supposed to be paying attention to what was being said because it involved him intimately and they could have been discussing how his good job could have been over compensation to hide the fact he was a spy or it could have been saying he was trying too hard to become the second in command and then aim finally to kill the Lord himself and become the new Lord. After all, they were all very, very paranoid. And even if it wasn't anything like that it wouldn't have been the first time that he would have been Crucio'd for not paying attention, for being off with the ghosts, in the other world dreaming of tattered cloth and curving stone. Pulling himself into focus to the two people in front of him he was immediately struck by the difference between the sharp cut, handsome Dark Lord and the slightly podgy dappled ness of Adhara, a man he had not known until a week or so ago which clearly showed that he was a foreigner but he couldn't be sure where from, conversation between them had not quite gotten that intimate. He had clearly listened in to the conversation a little too late because his Lord just announced that whatever they had been discussing previously would be perfectly satisfactory and that Adhara should leave the two of them alone. He braced himself subtly, expecting the worst but not wanting his Lord to know he was, after all that was the same as yelling in his face that he had been ignoring him and that was something that he would never, could never do. The pause was the worst, it was as though this part of whatever was going to happen was a little segregated, trapped inside parentheses in order to stop it spilling into the rest of their lives, to stop it being categorised as an event but only a mildly amusing piece stuck to his day. Being looked up and down had become a mildly unpleasant feeling and that was odd because he loved it when peopled looked at him, this look had the air of someone choosing the best pace at which to aim the terrible spell they were about to throw at you. And it was only when his Lord finally opened his pink lips and asked him how it felt to be promoted to third circle in his first week that he finally allowed himself to relax. But he truly did not know, his father had been in the inner circle and his mother (so fragile she flew away) had never been a part of the system, preferring to be a woman of leisure and grace and women in the families were not usually pushed into these kinds of things. It was more than he expected, no one was promoted until his Lord was sure they could be trusted and it had never happened in one week before and though the third was not the inner it was still a very bid deal, he would be told more, he would have more of a say in what they did and he would be able to boss around anyone below him. And he would be in is Lord's company more often. The balloons from the organisation parties would becomes their moons because they lived underground and they would float up and up, only to be crushed against the ceiling and be held there, trying to become one with an unwilling mistress and there they would stay, giving their sky a focus point. He replied with some adequate kind of response and it seemed to please his Lord because the man seemed to become fascinated by the liquid that he could feel swelling in his eyelash, it was weighing it down more and more and it would drop soon and he would have to be careful not to flinch.

He made him think of a crow landed gently in a field of snow with his black, neat hair and skin that put his own to shame, the kind of skin that you could tell had died and been brought back and when he smiled at him like that he appeared to be only a few years older than him and so much less scary, like a raven chewing on pearls. But there were wolves in his eyes and he felt so much less safe than he had in that average house on the average road being lit up like a parade with death spells. His Lord stroked his cheek with a single cold hand, gently, almost tenderly and it was as though he wasn't quite seeing his own face beneath his hand, but a bleached skull that he was examining for clues about its previous owner, in another life and for a second he had to wonder about his Lords past relationship with his father. But any thoughts of that disappeared with the press of cold but cushioned lips against his won and the faint taste of smoke curling into his nose. The ravens circled cornfields and when they descended it was an arrow with the speed of a bullet round and round and round, plummeting beautifully in order to allow the white balloons to give their feather a satisfactory glow and it was a good thing that their he was still in his black robes because there was no other way he would have been able to pass for the right bird. But there was lace over his face but there was none because it was the cold silk of his all powerful Lord and his eyes were sewn shut with thick black wool in a cross over each lid and it didn't really matter that it made him bleed because he was still covered in the blood of the battle of the past (and it seemed a minor point but he was getting dirty mudblood blood on the face and lips of the Dark Lord). And when he was led away there was no option other than to follow him because he was only a weak pureblood in the hands of something greater than mortality itself.

**AN: Please Review!**


	3. Chapter 3

**Slower **

Apparently he had been promoted all the way up to the inner circle, but he wouldn't have known it anymore: he never went on raids, into battle, even for most meetings he was confined to his Lord's quarters, to stay safe. And stay safe he did, though he missed the blood, the tang of magic on his tongue as he ripped something indefinite out of the body of some mudblood, a creature that should never have even lived, there were enough pure wizarding families in the whole world to avoid incest if they married out into other countries. When he knew that the others were doing a particularly big raid, a battle, a war he would stand under the shower and imagine that every drop that hit him was warm sanguine and his spirits would rise. When they came back he would note who didn't and spend hours visualising how he would have seen them die, how he could have saved them, how he could have avenged them. He was built to fight and not dream so when it all built up in him he would destroy some of those elegant, but somehow hollow, rooms and his Lord would fix them with a flick of his hand, forgive him and then push him into the bedroom once again. Like a toy. His abstract imagination had never been up to scratch and so the enemies in his head that he smote were always people he knew, people from school, from parties, form the newspaper or who he had known from his fathers work. And that odd feeling he had gotten when he saw Cho Chang became second nature to his mind and everyone he had known that he no longer could know of became an enemy in his head and he didn't know what would happen when they won and he was let out into the safe world because he wouldn't be able to quell the desire to tear them all apart.

Some days he would be honoured by it all and feel touched and loved and cared for and all those things he was told about when they were together in that over done room that had had no spirit from the first time he had walked into it. When he had no idea what it would lead to and his only thought was of that very moment and that made it hard to think back but he had to. Some days he would feel like that raven had plucked out his eyes and left him to wander the earth blindly groping his way though, relying in its wings on his hands to stop him stumbling down and trying not to buckle underneath from the pain of his bleeding sockets because if he did he would have lost the contact with the feathers for sure. Some days he felt like it killed him. Some days, some of the better days although not the best, the best were those days when he thought that maybe this was what it was like, maybe this was a loving relationship and he should be thankful. But in those days that were simply better he felt like he was some kind of model in a glorified extended shoot: he wore the best robes that any money could buy, displaying them to nobody but lounging elegantly across chairs and over the bed with a bored haughty expression. He would take careful attention to ensure that his outfit complimented nicely everything in the room he had chosen to pose in that day and would spend hours choosing the right pose fro his Lord to find him in. For a moment he had taken the flitting fancy to take up smoking and had procured a packet, they gave him a certain flair, he thought, but he didn't dare light them, if his teeth turned yellow he would have to have changed his whole wardrobe. And, of course, his Lord wouldn't like it, he liked him ghost-like, didn't want him out in the sun too much, getting dirty, the only colour he could bring to himself was the pink of exertion playing across his bones and if his Lord didn't like it then there would be trouble. And yet through all of the protection and longing to be involved in something, some kind of mass spell casting where he can live the crackling magic, the bloodshed where it is thick and cloyed in his hair instead of slipping though, he was still technically in the inner circle and he had the Dark Lord's ear and his trust and even his father had not been in a position as close as he was. None of the other Death Eaters, trapped in their power games and desperate bids for higher positions and more power, would dare to touch him as they stabbed each other in closeted corners, threatened each others secrets and held old marriage contracts in ransom, the thought of the loss of possible heirs proving to be a stronger driving force than the suggestion of the loss of existing lives. But he would not lose his opportunity for an heir because even the Dark Lord could accept that, being the last of his line, he had a duty to provide at least one male heir. Especially because he was the Dark Lord he understood the importance of carrying on such pure blood because if his line died out then any line could die out and if they all died out one day then there would be nothing left on their earth worth existing for and it would all crumble to dust. Even his Lord's own line would be continued eventually; homosexuality was no excuse for not producing an heir. It had always been common among their community but it was acceptable as long as they had a wife and a child and they stayed in the dark corners of night. And maybe that was why his Lord insisted on keeping him alone in his private chambers; underground despite the fact that they had procured plenty of safe ground above land where he could have gazed out of windows and remembered what colour looked like. He could only dream of his flower in the grey scale now but she had always had such pale skin and dark detail that it barely mattered and the fading had begun before this other relationship had anyway because he had begun to only ever see her one night had fallen and they had things to discuss that kept the candles cold and stark. But he should never dream or think of her because his Lord could read it in his mind and he would always know and his jealousy would flare so terribly that he would lose hope of ever seeing his home again because it bore the print of her upon the walls and folded into the heavy curtains and sheets. Nagini eventually became the creature that was there, the thing that would allow him to keep up the idea that he was alive, as long as she moved and responded to his petting and murmuring of a man driven half mad then he had to still be all there. Purgatory would contain no life, no insect vainly trying to suck a little more life by throwing itself into flames of white monks, becoming an ideal that could never die, it could contain no creature that held a soul and a shard. Her scales were as dark as the walls that he would throw water onto after each battle was reported, he was slowly allowed to less and less of the meetings in case anyone were to try to assassinate him but he would be told later by the Lord himself and once he was left alone he would so desperately try to make that wallpaper peel and stain and tear and look as devastated as that middle class house should have. War zones should never be allowed to be neat and tidy.

Alcohol allowed him too see clearly, to make a true friend of the snake, of the tribe of snakes and when he was sober he would watch them all devour each other and reach for the bottle, whispering secrets and listening devoutly for the footsteps of his master. Water to vodka, water to rum, water to absinthe and the last was the hardest because it had a colour change too and he used to forget that until he breathed it out in puffs of sleep when his Lord had not sucked it all out of him. He was staked as a pillar in the centre of an iced desert and the only way he could move was to melt the casing around him with a substance that froze much less easily than the traitorous water and one day it would let him run across that desert and hope to reach a precipice big enough to leap off and see if he couldn't fly. But it made his Lord hit him and bring colour to the field and the snow didn't like that so it would pile itself on thicker to hide the deplorable colour. And it made his Lord take away his wand and put odd spells that he couldn't quite hear onto him until he was so snowed under that his Lord couldn't see him anymore and even he was obliged to pour the fiery liquid into him to allow his crown to surface.

But it was a good thing, it was all a good thing because eventually his Lord decided that he should be able to go home for a little while, back to where he could see the sun and smell the air and see his flowers again. She was still there, she wouldn't have left as long as there was ever a chance that he would return because she would never abandon him and she was still there, waiting for him. He had been scared that he wouldn't recognise her because in the darkness he had stopped being able to picture her face (and had it been that long or had there been something else to it?) but he could see her clearly in the apparating room of his home and there was natural light and he hadn't been bothered to do that scale of magic for so long. And when they ate it had to be outside because none of the dining rooms were quite bright enough and it didn't matter that there was light drizzle in the air because it was softer than any shower and it helped keep the snow melting and it looked lilac in the sun. And it was the drizzle settling in his hair and the soft purple words of his flower that allowed him to drink real water and sweet red juices and what he saw was real and he could touch it and feel everything as it really was. But when he tried to touch Pansy she pulled away and for one moment everything spiralled down and down and he may not have even been there for real and it could have been all a dream until a house elf bumped into him and he was so relieved that he did not even punish it for its carelessness. And, carefully, the facts began to spill in and so many had died it had to be real because so many from both sides but they were winning, they were winning and almost no one he had known would have seen that, seen that in the end he had been right, he was always right. He had worn some of his lightest robes because even as a child he had always fooled himself that the summer months began long before they did, bypassing spring and he wanted to feel it all properly, feel the rain and the wind and the sun and he couldn't tell if he was shaking due to that wind or his previous drinking or his lack of drinking at that moment but it felt good to shake of something as natural as any of those. She was dressed conservatively and warmly and she had changed in the time he had gone because she would wear revealing robes even in winter and have that glint in her eyes that might had been just brushed away by wind that was playing with her hair. And if it had been longer, like it was before she went to Hogwarts, then it would have been touching him but he had seen strings like that before and they flicked round into little nooses in front of the ink painted, still bare trees of his wood and he had been told that going up into the real world was dangerous but he wouldn't listen.

Yet being in the open where his boundaries were set invisibly and life fluttered and died every moment and the trees and he grass and the plants and the dirt all knew him and the dirt that his parents' coffins were in could lie beneath his feet and reach up yearningly for him. Complete the set and make the ground whole again to it could resume its correct turning, lie in acceptance where he belonged but it was all out of shift because he should have married her already and he should have had two children, his heir and the spare, the one that would up the likeliness of getting the line continuity properly flowing again. He should have done it already and while he hid underground his lifeline was already being spanned out and he should have raided and won and won and there would have been glory when they laid him down because he was supposed to die young. But the coffin would eventually erode away and then the ground would get to his body and insects would thrive and he would have been filthy and if he had been above the ground the entire time he would have been filthy all the time and even the air outside was filled with dust and impurities that were sticking to his skin and infusing with it and tainting him and he had to get into a shower or a bath and then stay in isolated rooms because dust killed people eventually and mud crowed in glory every second it happened. And maybe his Lord did love him because those rooms were so sterile they made him weep sometimes, but it is better to weep than to die but better to kill than live and even up here for a few days he was not allowed to raid and it was even worse in the open air because he could smell the blood on the wind. He wondered if Harry Potter had seen this coming when flowers had seen him, sprung up, purple and pretty from the cracks in the cobbles along the side of the road to live for a few seconds before more sprung up further on and they died. His whole house was filled to the brim with solemn pansies and they grew from every crevice and he had to float so as not to step on them and he had to be silent so as for them not to hear him breathing. But the water falling out of his shower was not flowers and it was not purple, it was not lilac but nothing, no colour and it fell on him to steal away the dirt faster and faster because he needed it gone and he had to close his eyes to protect his eyes from the glare of the crushed flowers on the bathroom floor.

When he lay in the bed Pansy was lying beside him, silent and still but she was not asleep, looking almost faded in the lost light and when he tried to touch her she pulled away.

"I can smell him on you." And this floated across them before bouncing itself against the walls in an attempt to make it disappear but it was too late and everything had changed and all of those plans he knew she had lain out were destroyed and new ones had been made in its place and he wasn't sure what they were anymore. But he still loved her and she still loved him, he could tell and she didn't go out anymore, not onto the streets, it was dangerous and she could be killed by any passing mudblood and it was taking far to long to win this. He wished he could see her plans and understand how she was going to control this all but the grey scale did not include that shade of green and they lay there. He couldn't see the files of his mind anymore; it was just dust that wouldn't come out and lavender rain.

"I can't save you from this."


End file.
